The Fighter Mafia was a controversial group of U.S. Air Force officers and civilian defense analysts who, in the 1960s and 1970s, advocated for fighter design criteria in opposition to those of the design boards of the time. Their assertions included: Contemporary Air Force generals established poor criteria for combat effectiveness that ignored historical combat data. Design focus on high technology and planes that could go "higher, faster, and farther" increased costs and decreased effectiveness. The group's view was that cheaper designs would have been more effective. The bureaucracy of the Air Force was corrupt, allegedly dishonestly testing weapons before buying them and deploying them in the field. The focus of the USAF should have been on close air support and the use of combined arms to support maneuver warfare rather than interdiction bombing. Multi-role and multi-mission capability plane designs were fundamentally compromised compared to specialized designs. Beyond visual range combat was a fantasy. The Fighter Mafia also advocated the use of John Boyd and Thomas P. Christie's energy-maneuverability (E-M) theory in designing fighter aircraft. The E-M model enabled quantitative comparison of the performance of aircraft in terms of air combat maneuvering in the context of dogfighting. The Fighter Mafia influenced the specifications for the F-X and went on to independently develop specifications for the Light Weight Fighter (LWF). The next generation of warplanes combined both maneuverability (which the group advocated) as well as large active radars and radar-guided missiles (which they opposed). Aircraft in this generation included the F-14, F-15, F-16 and F/A-18. Name The nickname, a professional jest coined by Everest Riccioni, an Air Force member of Italian heritage, was a rejoinder to the "Bomber Mafia", theorists at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s whose ideas led to the primacy of heavy bomber aircraft performing strategic bombing over that of fighter. History In the 1960s, both the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy were in the process of acquiring large, heavy fighters designed primarily to fight with missiles. Project Forecast, a 1963 Air Force attempt to identify future weapons trends, stated that a counter air defense must be able to destroy aircraft at long ranges using advanced weapon systems. The Air Force felt that these needs would be filled for the next twenty years by missile-armed variants of the F-111 and F-4 Phantom II with no gun. Their F-X fighter acquisition program, initially merged into the